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Use Zapier to track Medium articles that mention your community
If members of your community are writing about you on Medium, you may want to track that activity in your workspace.
Well we have a Zapier workflow to help you do just that.
The Zap works by grabbing your Medium RSS feed, pulling out specific Medium articles that match your selected tags, and then creating members and activities for the article in Orbit.
We’ll walk you through how to set it up.
1) Open the Zap template
Open the Medium Zap template and click Try it. You will see a screen with 4 steps.
2) Set up the trigger
We’ll first set up your RSS trigger, which will look for new items in the feed. Medium RSS triggers poll every 15 minutes to see if there's anything new.
First, select a RSS Feed URL to use from Medium (make sure the URL you are using is publicly accessible). Medium allows you to pull feeds for specific profiles, specific publications, or tags applied to posts. Click here for more information on Medium RSS Feed URLs.
If you use a “Tagged pages in a publication” type of RSS feed, the tag you choose can be anything.
When you have the RSS Feed URL you want, enter it into the Feed URL input box.
2) Action: Filter my data in Filter by Zapier (optional)
Next, if you want to further filter the Medium articles that are triggering the workflow, use the “Only continue if…” step.
For example, if your company has an official blog on Medium, you might not want to create activities in Orbit for official blog posts. If so, you could add a filter to make sure certain keywords that indicate your official blog are not included in the URL.
Another example would be checking for a username by making sure that the URL includes an @ symbol or that part of the URL before medium.com also contains a username. This is based on Medium’s URL structure: there’s either an @ symbol in front of the username, or, if you've turned on the Subdomain feature, then it’s username.medium.com.
With these filters in place, we are now just looking for Medium users who are creating content about your specified tag.
If you don’t want to add any filters, delete this step in the workflow.
3) Action: Format my data in Formatter by Zapier
This action will parse the URL of the Medium post to extract the Medium Username of the author. The username is not always present in the feed (sometimes it’s the same as the author name, sometimes it isn’t), so we need to do this step to ensure we can alway get the username.
This is the trickiest step and will require some RegEx knowledge in order to successfully extract the username.
Under Transform, select Extract Pattern. Then use the RegEx pattern “@[a-zA-Z0-9]+” to extract the username that’s preceded by an “@” from the URL.
4) Action: Create activity in Orbit
Now, we have everything we need to create an activity in Orbit. We've got the title of the post, the URL of the post, the author’s Medium username, and a few other pieces of metadata we can pass in.
Some notes to help you fill it out:
Field | Definition | Example |
Activity Title | This is a title you can set for this specific activity | Published [Article Title] |
Activity Description | A specific description for this activity | Wrote an article titled [Article Title] |
Activity Type | The name for this type of Activity. If you’ve used this activity before, you can leave this blank | Published Article on Medium |
Activity Type Key | The key for this activity type | medium:article:published |
Activity Link Text | The text used to display the URL | Medium article link |
Activity Link | The article URL | use data field [Link] |
Activity Weight | The importance of this activity type. If content creation is important for your community goals, consider using a higher Activity Weight for this Activity Type (the highest weight is 10, the lowest is 0). | 6 |
Occurred at | The time this activity occurred | use data field [Pub Date] |
New or Additional Member Tags | If you want to tag members who have done this activity so you can easily find them and report on them | Medium Author |
Custom Identity source | This lets Orbit know what source the username being passed in is from | medium |
Custom Identity Username | The username from this source | use data field [Output 0] |
Custom Identity Link | The URL to this user’s Medium profile | https://medium.com/[Output 0] |
In the end, your Zap step should look something like this:
Some things to keep in mind
- There's no email address or profile data in the feed that Medium provides, so the user will be created with their author name and/or their Medium username.
- This creates a custom “identity” in Orbit for the user based on the Medium username.
- Once they are created as members in Orbit, most Medium authors will need to be merged into their other profiles if they already exist in Orbit.
- There's no historical import (Medium only presents a limited set of recent articles in their feeds).
- There's no way to track interactions or comments (this information is not included in the RSS feed, so we have no way of accessing it).
Any questions about integrating Medium with Orbit?
This is a custom solution that may require an advanced understanding of Zapier. If you have any questions, please ask us in our Discord and we’re happy to help.
- Use Zapier to track Medium articles that mention your community
- 1) Open the Zap template
- 2) Set up the trigger
- 2) Action: Filter my data in Filter by Zapier (optional)
- 3) Action: Format my data in Formatter by Zapier
- 4) Action: Create activity in Orbit
- Some things to keep in mind
- Any questions about integrating Medium with Orbit?